On bored
John Betjeman in his poem the Village Inn penned these lines:
“and village bores more sure to roam
To village inns than stay at home“
You could substitute cruise ships for village inns for you are at sea at the mercy of the floating bore.
Our next port of call is Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. I therefore attended a lecture on the country. Here I learned that Vietnam over the last 2000 years has a distinguished national history of defying foreign occupation from the Chinese to the French to the Americans. I never knew that after the war the British sided with the French, whose Vichy government had occupied Vietnam, even arming Japanese prisoners of war so great was the fear of Ho Chi Minh’s communists. The Americans dropped two and half times the number of bombs on Vietnam than fell in World War Two in the whole of western Europe but still the Vietnamese did not buckle and by 1976 the USA admitted failure. 10 years later the Vietnamese adopted a softer Communist line not unlike China nowadays and now it’s a popular tourist destination.
So far so good. This was illuminating stuff. However the art curator in his talk on Chagall repeated the same spiel, including his jokes, as I heard the first time.
Marc Chagall was born and raised in the same town in Russia (now Belarus) called Vitebsk as my great grandfather. My great grandfather rendered him some service for which he was offered a painting but insisted on cash. Rather than an appreciation of this great symbolic colourist we heard about the art deals he struck in his career and why the pictures he was offering were incredible value. I do not think I will attend his final lecture on Miro. It was left to me to feed him a line on the Fake or Fortune programme in which the Chagall authentication committee not only adjudged that the work featured in the programme was a fake but ordered its destruction. This generated an interesting discussion. He told us that all dealers live in fear of this Chagall committee who decide what will go into the definitive catalogue and without whose certificate you cannot validate provenance. In his view signature was overrated as a measure of provenance. Picasso for example would not sign the picture till the deal was done and the bitter relationship between his children Claude and Maya extends to the validating of his works. Of course the curator was too clever for them in getting his work validated.
Between lunch and dinner I had my single greatest achievement to date. There was a spare washing machine – these are more coveted than a reservation in the exclusive Champagne restauarant. True to form as the philosophy here is “our way or no way”: Oddjob, my butler, was not allowed to do the launderette washing. So I managed it myself and yeaaay! I beat the system as the dry cleaning service charges $3 for each pair of underpants. Seeing the tumble drier full of another passenger’s clothing a subversive thought crossed my mind of secreting this somewhere on board (“Steady on Tickler, they probably have CCTV and they will keel haul you”) I need to work more subtly. Perhaps a Select Committee with the Dorking know-all and a tough US lawyer (there must be several on board) and summon the Serb client relations manager before us. I saw myself as Dale Campbell- Savours or Margaret Hodge behind my large desk with the petrified Serb on a chair shredding her.
The dinner arrangements created a confusion which the subversive me rather enjoyed. I created a fuss when the reception staff would not make a dinner booking for the Xmas dinner. Eventually I was informed I had a table of six but those whom I invited, the American sisters and the know-all from Dorking, were already invited by a cruise director. I felt at bit peaked but assumed that my reservation overruled any invitation. Not so. At 4 I was called to ask if I was accepting the room reservation manager’s invitation. Assuming my last guest, a delightful Swiss lady, was invited by someone, I accepted. At cocktails before dinner the Swiss lady had declined her invitation for mine. She looked rather sorry for herself at the prospect of no dinner company but Robert the dancer who has responsibility for solos stepped in.
Our table host came from Mumbai and I was interested to talk to him about his city and of the novel Sharandam set there. He had a greater preference to drone on about his work. One of my beefs here I have is that there is lot of self promotion. The cabaret singer exhorted us to give her a good rating and a social get together for new guests rapidly turned into a promotion of the latest cruise ship. We only had two other guests on our table, one being the Swedish moaner who was actually rather pleasant and the other a frumpy woman from Barnsley I called the Yorkshire Pudding. When that lady said that much she enjoyed cruising , “with her late husband who died last year”, only by the fifth course I expressed my deep sadness, but this was not for her bereavement, but I had gone short with Pargie that the first bereavement reference would be within 30 minutes.
Thee was a Xmas show but for this Scrooge the only thing worth celebrating about Xmas is its conclusion.
